Professor Peter Higgs had a fair few ideas about how life came to be (Picture: PA)
Peter Higgs, a physicist whose idea of a mysterious particle that could help explain why we all exist ended with cheers and champagne, has died.
He was 94.
The death of the British physicist and Nobel Prize winner was announced by the University of Edinburgh, where he was an emeritus professor.
No further details were provided.
The university’s principal, Professor Peter Mathieson, said: ‘Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.
‘His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.’
Higgs was just 35 when, as an assistant professor at Edinburgh University in 1964, he had a bright idea.
All the particles zipping around us have mass, but scientists have never been quite sure why. Knowing this would help the world know, simply put, why it exists in the first place – why we, the stars, everything in the universe, came to be.
Higgs visiting the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland (Picture: CERN Geneva/PA Wire)
Around this time, physicists were busy unlocking the secrets of the cosmos – Einstein had just cracked relativity – but they were all stumped as to why elementary particles, as tiny as you can get, had mass.
The math around quantum theory, or how the world works on a subatomic level, just never quite added up.
But what if, Higgs suggested, there is a particle that imbues everything and everyone with mass. When we’re inside this big invisible force field, elementary particles are fattened with mass – without it, they would just float away like light.
Neither atoms nor life would exist.
This kicked off a decades-long, worldwide, billion-pound search for the Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God particle’ given how it could casually explain the nature of existence.
In other words, Higgs had cracked the code – but needed science to catch up first.
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This boson would come to form the Standard Model, which covers nothing less than all of human knowledge about elementary particles and the ways they shape and make the universe.
But this boson would prove very, very tricky to track down. The idea was that we could chip off a bit of the invisible Higgs field by whacking it hard enough to make a Higgs particle come out, even if for a millionth of a second.
And in 2012, Higgs walked into a lecture hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva, to a standing ovation.
The boson named after him (and, well, God) had just been found.
Speaking from a webcam, Higgs wiped away a tear as he said: ‘It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime.’
He would win a Nobel Prize just one year later.
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